My Green Manifesto (5 page)

I don't know about you, but my own inclination is to return to the personal, which is not to turn from the altruistic to the selfish. What I am suggesting is that, as pressing as the end of the world is, most of us have other fish to fry. I am not saying that this should be the case, just that it is. And I am not the first to suggest that, as vital as saving the world is, saving ourselves is of some importance, too.

The dark secret of kayaking is that it can be pretty boring. Even with the stimulation of the changing weather and animal life, there are moments when the activity
grows tedious and my back and arms ache. Doing anything for eight hours will wear you down. On the other hand the boring moments are more than counterbalanced by the delightful ones. On the banks of the marsh I see empty mussel shells and wonder if I'll catch a glimpse of a river otter.
That
would be worth any tedium. Less romantic than imagining that sight, but equally stimulating, is the twenty minutes I spend paddling through what signs announce as a LICENSED SHOOTING PRESERVE. Gunfire tends to keep the human mind alert.

The noise dies out as the river seems to change to creek. Suddenly I am twisting and turning back on myself in a sinuous maze, the marsh undermining any sense of progress. It often feels like I am going backwards, but I know that if I just keep paddling I'll cover the thirteen miles I need to before I get to my campsite by nightfall.

As I slog through the marshy passage, red-winged blackbirds, proud of their blazing orange epaulets, cluck at me, scolding. They let go with their three-word song, the last note like a punchline. Calmer now, I return to the ideas that spooked me an hour ago. It would be mauling a metaphor to say that water grounds me, but at the very least all this sweating and sun and full-on weather helps me consider the prospect of our environmental annihilation without risking another panic attack. I know I can offer no global theories, but maybe I can do something more modest: offer examples of people, like Dan, who have made nature—and fighting for nature—part of their lives and seem the better for it. This may not be much help in the face of the greater gloom and doom, but it's really all I've got.

I suspect that this is something like the way Dan felt when his superiors first sent him off to work on the river,
almost as a prank. He must have been overwhelmed by the seemingly impossible problem of greening the Charles. Why impossible? Because the land he needed, if he were to re-plant the river's banks, had been owned or appropriated by individuals and corporations, and had been for decades. How could he possibly convince them that they should relinquish something they thought theirs? Did he glimpse right away that this would be his life's work, did he follow the vision from the start? No, it would have seemed preposterous. And if he had allowed himself to get excited, it would have led to excitement's opposite: panic and despair.

I wonder when it started to change for him. When did the fear and anxiety turn into something else? When did that frozen feeling in his brain begin to melt into momentum? Because, that is the thing about impossible tasks. Yes, they are intimidating; yes, they are daunting; yes, they can paralyze us. But they also can excite us, challenge us, enlarge us.
What if I can really do this?
he must have thought at some point. Anyone who has tackled anything big—building a house, fighting a battle, writing a book—knows the joy of the moment when the tide finally turns. And if the task is Quixotic, all the better. In his book,
Life Work,
the poet Donald Hall records the moment when he asked the sculptor Henry Moore what “the meaning of life” was. Moore replied: “The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing—it must be something you cannot possibly do!” Exactly! Perhaps there was even a point where Dan started to relish how absurd, how huge, the task at hand was.

Tell me to save the world and I will panic. Some jobs are simply too big, too daunting. Too much for one individual. But tell me to save a chunk of that world, a river say, and I might just become engaged. Give me something to work at, to work with, outside myself, and I will.

I've always liked the word “turtle.” Like “boing” or “scrotum” it seems innately comic. Today turtles, specifically painted turtles, are my companions; over the course of the afternoon I see hundreds of them. Almost despite myself, I'm getting to know their yellow and dark-green striped heads, the orange under their shells, the glistening water on those shells before they plop into the water. It's a beautiful sight, but let's face it: This marsh is not exactly pristine and in the black banks of muck I see tennis balls and beer bottles and, mysteriously, dozens of orange golf balls. When I finally emerge from the marsh, I pass a dock with a large American flag, unfurled for the coming holiday, and, next to the dock, a massive fire pit on the riverbank.

It isn't until mid-afternoon that I pass the first human being I've seen since leaving Dan this morning. This is an amazing fact considering I've been paddling through the suburban towns of Medfield, Millis, and Sherborn. It's a guy about my age fishing under a bridge. He claims to have caught eighteen fish—most recently a catfish and a bass. The Charles, I know, used to be a dead place. “Dirty Water,” as the song went, so even the possibility that he has caught this many is reassuring. The guy asks me to look for a lure he lost downstream and I do after shouting goodbye.

Late in the afternoon I see another kayaker. Strangely though, rather than a feeling of companionship, I experience a prickly irritation, something maybe not too dissimilar
to the way the great blue heron feels upon seeing me. What is this guy doing on
my
river? Of course I shout hello but it might be more honest to emit a heron-like
sproak!
The moment passes soon enough, though, and I am alone again. I paddle below a railroad trestle, navigate a field of sunken logs, and enter the Rocky Narrows Reservation, where I will camp for the night. Rocky Narrows is conservation land, owned and protected by the Trustees of Reservations.

I set up camp on a little ledge of grass a few feet above the river. Here the water pivots around my campsite and the little beach where I pull up the kayak. Nearby, a large willow kneels, dipping its hair in the river. Once I feel organized, I grab my pack and pull out a beer and a sandwich and sit with my legs hanging over the ledge to drink my beer and listen to the kissy noise of a chipmunk. A Baltimore oriole flashes by.

After I finish the beer, I reach deep into my dry bag, uneasy about the shameful task I have to perform next. Dan and I have agreed that I will call him to fine tune the morning's meeting, which means this is officially my first camping trip armed with a cell phone. But when I pull the phone out I discover that it is dead. Not just a little dead either—there is nothing that says “No Service” or “Dead Battery” or even “Alltell.” No, this is utter death. I shake it a little and push a few of the buttons in simian fashion and then think about slamming it on a rock or something. What follows is a strange moment of panic: egads, I'm
disconnected.
I can feel my mind beginning to obsess over the problem, and can imagine spending the next couple of hours trying to resuscitate the machine. Not wanting to go down that ugly route, I jam the phone back into the dry bag and open a second beer. To my surprise, it doesn't take but
a minute to move beyond the phone crisis. So strange that even just turning off a cell phone, or being unintentionally disconnected from one, is a step into a wilder world.

I sip the beer and watch a long finger of light shaft down through the pines. It occurs to me that this would be a good spot to have sex if I were traveling with, say, my wife. I scribble down notes for an essay about wild sex in the wild—anything to help jazz up Nature's dowdy reputation. Meanwhile, streaks of sunset bleed into the river as a beaver plows by, heading back upstream. A barred owl lets out a series of classic whoos. Solo camping can be both thrilling and terrifying. I remember the first time I spent a couple nights alone in California's Lassen Park; I was sure the deer grazing outside the tent were killer bears. Over the years, I've become gradually less nervous. The woods behind me feel substantial and it seems I have the place to myself, at least until I hear a loud stomping and yelling coming down one of the paths. What enemy tribe is this? Three joggers and two dogs crash their way toward my campsite and suddenly my patch of wildness feels a little tamer. When they see my tent they grow quiet, and while they stop to let their dogs splash in the river I tell them about my trip. To my own surprise my voice sounds excited, almost overly so, and I realize I am already turning the day into a story.

I have always enjoyed spending days alone—solo days carry a special thrill—but for me, as a writer and storyteller and human animal, there is something else going on during these trips. I am readying my narrative, preparing to tell someone, itching to recreate my day. Pity the poor innocent who is the first person I bump into after these trips—the unlucky woman, for instance,
who sat next to me at the coffee shop counter in Chester after my trip into Lassen—who gets her ear talked off.

I ask the runners how they happen to have come this far into the woods, and learn that I'm not quite as secluded as I hoped: there's a trailhead and a road a couple of miles away. After they leave it quickly grows dark. I urinate around the camp's perimeters to ward off other visitors and return to my ledge over the water, waiting for the moon, breathing in the slightly skunky smell of the river. I consider smoking the cigar I've stuffed in my dry pack, but when the moon doesn't show up, I climb into my tent. The night is quiet enough, despite the steady highway howl in the background. I settle in my sleeping bag with a book and flashlight.

I'm reading a book called
Break Through
, written by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, two lifelong environmental advocates best known for releasing an attention-grabbing essay called “The Death of Environmentalism.” That paper, which sparked a lively debate, advocated breaking environmentalism out of its granola ghetto and tackling global warming head-on, which, according to the authors, and contrary to most conservatives, would actually create jobs and help the economy. I thought I'd pick up the book because it seemed to fit my present mood, and I'd heard that Nordhaus and Shellenberger, like me, have grown tired of both musty mysticism and hysterical apocalypse-ism, favoring a more practical, hard-headed brand of environmentalism. I find myself nodding through their initial arguments as the authors criticize yet another manner of speaking about nature, that of the technocrat.

It gradually dawns on me, though, that the two authors seem to rail against the technocracy with their own form of techno-speak. I really wanted to like this book, but while I am full of admiration for these two men—mostly for their willingness to jab a stick in the environmental hornets' nest—as I read on it seems to me that they ultimately lack a truly creative response to crisis. They want “greatness,” which they conveniently define as their own Apollo energy proposals. They tell me that what drives those of us interested in nature—which they consistently, ridiculously define as “hiking”—is a kind of post-materialist affluence, mocking anyone who might have more complex reasons to seek out the non-human world. Meanwhile, they happily belittle the contributions of old time environmental heroes like Rachel Carson. They seem to believe that human beings started to think about nature in the nineteenth century, around the same time Thoreau did, conveniently forgetting, or misplacing, the million years or so when we
lived
in the natural world.

In fact, what astounds me as I make my way through their text is that I don't encounter a single rock or tree or bird. Before too long I'm tempted to unzip the tent and toss the book in the river with the rest of the debris headed seaward. It's not that I disagree with a lot of their premises. Their willingness to criticize their august environmental forefathers, to suggest that the problems of poverty and environmentalism are deeply intertwined, is definitely praiseworthy. And whether or not you agree with them, their take is refreshing in that they try to shake things up. They also, for the most part, attempt to translate environmental policy into English while eschewing the gloomy rhetorical style that environmentalists have been known for
since the dark days of the seventies when Jimmy Carter and his sweater first preached to us about conserving.